Today's Palm Sunday. It's the day of course, that we remember where Jesus made his entrance into Jerusalem. I've been thinking about— obviously, I hit 70 a few weeks, a few weeks ago. It's interesting how everybody has a different perspective about what you should do when you are 70 years old: cash in your chips; aren't you going to move to Arizona, retire? I just don't have that in my heart, number one, partly because I don't feel as though I've finished what God has asked me to do yet. I was thinking about just this whole idea of finishing well. In order for anybody to finish, well, you know what they have to do? They have to keep their eyes on the finish line. They can't get their eyes looking at all other places and all of the things. You know what, Jesus finished well. Jesus finished well.

Jacque: I'm wasting away to nothing. I'm burning up with fever. I'm a ghost of my former self, half consumed already by terminal illness. My jaws ache from gritting my teeth. I'm nothing but skin and bones. I'm like a buzzard in the desert, a crow perched on the rebel, insomniac. I twitter away mournful as a sparrow in the gutter. All day long, my enemies taunt me while others just curse. They bring in meals, casseroles of ashes. I draw drink from a barrel of my tears. There is nothing left of me, a withered weed, swept clean from the path.

Brian: How many of you are inspired after reading this?

Jacque: I think my life seems pretty good.

He doesn't sound like it mighty warrior. He doesn't talk like a mighty warrior. He doesn't look like a mighty warrior. He doesn't act like a mighty warrior, and he has got this perspective of not a mighty warrior. He is even kind of like blaming God: You've turned us over to the Midianites. You've done all this. But I love the response of God. Here is what God did.

What so many Christians still don't really believe is that, like I mentioned this morning, the God who loves them actually likes them. The God who loves you actually really likes you, but we struggle with that. We really struggle with that.

You might be a guy that has suffered severe abuse. Abuse isn't just directed to females. Now, it is probably more prevalent against females, but there are men today who are suffering with post-traumatic stress from being abused, being rejected, being neglected. They are emotional just tiny people. He wants all of us who are bent low to know he loves us. He knows all about our pain. He knows all about those people who have rejected you and left you locked out, bent over, humiliated and broken. Maybe it happened last night. Maybe it happened a lifetime ago. Maybe it happened like this lady, 18 years earlier in her life. Maybe it happened a week ago. The Lord is saying something that he wants every one of us to know.

How many of you know that criticism will find you even when you don't leave a forwarding address? Criticism will find you no matter where you go. Oftentimes, almost all criticism will come from people who are actually doing less than you are doing. Jacque and I have had a lot of discussions about this through the years, and we've asked ourselves this question as we've gotten older: why do we give criticism such a strong voice in our heads? Why do we listen to criticism so much? Why do we allow it to almost dictate our choices or how we think about ourselves or whatever? There have been times where I think we've tried to live life in such a way that nobody would ever criticize us. Well, that's an exercise in futility. Let me tell you something.

I have a question for everybody. How many of you are breathing? Okay. As long as you have breath, there is a promise within you. As long as you are breathing, there is a promise within you. Like Elizabeth, you are carrying a promise and God has spoken a promise to every single one of us, sometimes multiple promises to us. Maybe you haven't felt any movement in that promise, maybe for a long time. Maybe for 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years, there has been seemingly no movement, and maybe you don't see any evidence of the promise. Now we are thinking or you are, "Did I even hear from God? Did I even hear from God? Did I hear right? Is the promise still within me or has it completely died? Am I still going to give birth to this promise?" I'm telling you, I believe the Lord is sending me to you today to tell you there is a promise in you, and to fan that flame.

Brian: "It is mine to avenge," the Lord says, "and I will repay." That means that God will help make right, the wrongs that have committed against you. People lie about you and people steal from you and people abuse you and people take advantage of you. God wants to repay you for every unfairness because God is a God of justice. He is a God of fairness. He wants to repay us good for the evil that have happened to us.

Jacque: Be generous.

Brian: Be generous, yes. Obviously, these kinds of losses or injustices, they can leave scars or memories or wounds in our lives. I'm sure we could say many times a week, that's not fair. That's not fair.

Jacque: Kids start saying it the moment they can talk.

Brian: That's right. Yeah. The first word they learn is mine, of course.

Jacque: Then no.

Brian: Not mom or dad, mine. And then the next thing they learned before they say, mom and dad is, "That's not fair. Why do I have to go to bed and you get to stay up?" That's not fair. All of these things, these kinds of losses and injustices, they can result in us being tempted to hold on to our grief or our wound or our grudges. What ends up happening is, the longer we hold onto a grudge, the bigger it becomes and eventually that grudge begins to hold us. It holds us.

No matter what we have gone through in our lives, even no matter how unfair something was that happened to us, and I'm sure if you live long enough, injustice is going to happen to all of us; unfair things are going to happen to every single one of us. No matter how disappointed we were, we have to learn how to release it and let go of it. One of the reasons that I like to do these pauses multiple times a day is because one of the things that I say to the Lord is this: I give everyone and everything to you. I give everyone, and I give everything to you, everyone, and everything to you, God. In doing that, there is a weight that seems to be lifted off of my heart, my shoulder, and my spirit. There is a giving to God, my future, my circumstances, my hopes, and my dreams— that's the everything. And then those people who disappoint me or hurt me or say things against me, falsely, even, I give those to God. In giving them to God, that wound that that person has caused in my life is all of a sudden, not as heavy to bear any longer.

Jacque: Oh yes, you shaped me first inside then out. You formed me in my mother's womb. I thank you, high God. You are breathtaking.

Brian: Just ponder on that for a second. Wouldn't it be great if even everybody who called themselves Christians really had that perspective? Oh God, you are breathtaking. We used to sing a song, it's been a number of years, but you take my breath away. If we really ponder and look at the beauty and the incredibleness of God, and especially when we look at the vastness of the universe, how that's so breathtaking and God can really take our breath away.

Jacque: From one cell, a complex body is created on the side of a woman.

Brian: It's baffling.

Jacque: It's breathtaking. It is. Body and soul, I am marvelously made. I worship in adoration. What a creation! You know me inside and out; you know every bone of my body. You know exactly how I was made bit by bit.

Brian: Jesus was a doer and he modeled what it was like to be in a passionate relationship with his heavenly father. Basically, Jesus said this: if you are tired of the way you've been doing it, and you want rest for your souls, then come and copy the details of my life. If you are tired of the weariness of your life, then come and copy the details of my life, because that's my yoke. I want you to read that portion of scripture found in, in Matthew chapter 11.

Jacque: Verses 28-30. You chose the Message Bible. It's so good. Are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion? Come to me; get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me, watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

What's next? Yeah. What's next? What the Lord encouraged me to do, kind of the word or the idea for my life and for me, was Brian, stay the course; stay the course. So I asked the Lord, “How do I do that? Tell me what you mean,” and he goes back to what he spoke to me about seven or eight years ago. He said, "Keep reading the words in red." Keep reading the words and red, which are the words of Jesus in the New Testament. Keep reading the words in red, the red letters. I was tempted to say, I've been doing that for quite a while now, Lord, but I didn't want to get chastised, because I knew he was going to say, “Well, when are you going to start doing them all?” There is an end game that God has in mind that we need to be targeting and focused upon. That end game is to become more like Jesus, become more like him. It's really interesting.

Brian: This morning, I want to give you kind of the rest of the story. Oftentimes, the Christmas story kind of in a lot of our minds, ends with the birth and the manger and the wise man. That's kind of the combination of our celebration of Christmas, but there is actually another part of the story that I think is equally valid and important. It's a little bit more neglected, but we find a good portion of this still in Luke chapter 2, but beginning in verse 22 through verse 32, we see these words written. Jacque, why don't you to read that for us.

Jacque: This is from the message. Then when the days stipulated by Moses for purification were complete, they took him up to Jerusalem to offer him to God as commanded in God's law. Every male who opens the womb shall be a holy offering to God, and also to sacrifice the, of doves or two young pigeons prescribed in God's law.

Let's just pause here for a second. God's heart is for us to experience so deeply that our response would be like the disciples when they were forbidden to talk about Jesus. What was their response after the resurrection? They said, 'We can't help but do it right. I mean, I can't keep my mouth shut.' I can guarantee you something; if the Minnesota Vikings ever won the Super Bowl, nobody in Minnesota would keep their mouth shut about that. This is so much greater than that for Minnesotans. He says he has made us from nothing into something, from rejected into accepted. He wants you and me to tell other people about that; for what reason? So that they can experience the same thing we've experienced. Let's go on.

Terror is living up to its name today, and I'm not just talking about Taliban terror. They are still alive and well, of course, but we have terror over COVID. We have terror over people losing their jobs. We have terror over what's going to happen in the future. Terror is living up to its name today, and we could use a big dose of joy. We could use a big dose of joy. So I want to read this portion of scripture of the Christmas story is found in Luke chapter 2, verses 8-14 above the shepherds and the angels. Jacque, why don't you read that real quickly?

The promises of God do something within the hearts of us. They strengthen us. They give us hope when things are dark. We know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. We know that. Our whole calendar is based on the birth of Christ, isn't it? We look at historical dates and we say, this person lived and in 400 BC. What does the BC stands for?

Jacque: Before Christ.

Brian: Before Christ. Yes. And then of course, there are other dates that come after his birth and that's called AD. Ad is like an abbreviation for the Latin term, Anno Domini, which means in the year of our Lord. So we are living in 2020 in the year of our Lord, even though it feels like a bad year. It's still the year of the Lord, and there are still great things that are taking place in our lives.

What do you think it would be like to have gotten a promise from God and then ended up in Dachau or Auschwitz, if you were a Jew? What was it like to get these promises from God, and then hear nothing from heaven for years upon years upon years? One can almost hear the questions being passed from one generation to another. Was God gone? Did we hear God correctly? Did we miss it when we thought we heard what God had said? Was faith in God just a waste of time? Have any of you ever thought that? Have you been so delayed in a promise, so frustrated with the circumstance, so tired of reading the promises of God that seem to never come to pass, that you thought maybe this is just a waste of time? I like the word… I think one of my favorite words in all of the Bible is the word suddenly. Don't you love that word? But suddenly when the time was right, the fields outside of Bethlehem lit up like the noonday sun and it was midnight.

The Christian life is also filled, is to be filled with the spirit of Jesus. We've been looking at the verse in Luke chapter 11, where Jesus said to his disciples and those people he was teaching, how much more willing is your father in heaven willing to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask? The spirit of Jesus, when we are filled with the spirit of Jesus, we will bear his nature in the very same way that an Apple bears the nature of the Apple tree. The fruit of the spirit, the way we speak, the character that we are, or have, the attitudes and longings of our lives, these things reveal, this fruit actually reveals the tree that we are grafted into, doesn't it? It reveals who we are connected to.

But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted. He also divides up the plunder. Here is the good news. The someone stronger was the word who became flesh. The someone stronger was Jesus. When Jesus later on, sent out the 70 for ministry, he commanded them to do some things. He said, "Go heal the sick cast out demons and preach the gospel." It's really interesting to me. I asked myself the question, what was the good news that they preached? Because when Jesus had sent them out, the cross hadn't happened yet, the resurrection hadn't happened yet. So what actually was the good news that Jesus was sending them out to preach? What was this news? This is what this news was, that the kingdom of God had launched a beachhead in alien territory.